Re: Belated introduction: Indexing

On Tuesday 11 February 2003 09:53 am, John Cowan wrote:
> I'm not sure why you say that LMNL doesn't hit the sweet spot for index=
ing:
> overlapping markup is what it does very well.  What it doesn't do so we=
ll,
> at least in the current form, is *structural* markup: in particular,
> [A}[B}foo{B]{A], [A}[B}foo{A]{B], [B}[A}foo{B]{A], and [B}[A}foo{A]{B],
> all mean exactly the same thing: three characters "f", "o", "o" which
> constitute both range A and range B.  To escape this unsatisfying
> conclusion, one has to use layers, which are just as crufty in LMNL as
> milestones are in SGML/XML.

Actually, you can use layers, or you can use the reified layer. In the=20
canonical ARA model, the reified layer would be reflected all the way bac=
k up=20
through nested range constructors so that if you wanted to preserve the=20
difference, you could.